Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Six days – or five?

When I posed the question of Saturday delivery a few days ago, many of you had an opinion.

In our poll, 30 percent of you said “keep things the way the were.” In other words, no change in any delivery, including Saturday.

But 52 percent of you wanted “no delivery” on Saturday, and another four percent voted to skip Tuesday.

The comments were telling. More than a few people agreed that home delivery might not be missed, but suggested to continue Saturday P.O. Box delivery, making it truly a paid, premium service. One commenter thought that regular delivery should be suspended, but to offer Priority and Express Mail deliveries on Saturday. This would ease the Monday crunch and still make these products stand out from the competition.

There will be more comments tomorrow.

And for the record, Benny has no opinion here. Just passing on your comments!

How about you? Click on the comment button below, or if you are receiving this by email, click here to post.

3 comments:

ENTan-todd
said...

We need to cut back and deliver mail to 5 days. T-6 carriers can be Unassigned regular, fill in for those who are on vacation, sick, etc. As FTR carriers retire, then they can bid on the route. We are not hiring PTFs right now, so this should help the USPS. Having 5 day delivery would really save us money in gasoline, vehicle maintenance, overtime payment, etc. Majority of the businesses are closed on Saturdays anyway. However, if they want their mail delivered on Saturday, we can use PTFs/TEs to deliver the mail but these businesses should pay a special fee for weekend mail delivery - just like we do with Sunday/Holiday Express Mail.On Monday, we deliver all FCM & periodicals, curtail BBM/3rd class mail. Mail volume is generally light on Tuesdays. This would require our Plant to make proper separation of classes of mail when they process them thru AFSMs.I believe it's time for us to consider this and get the buy-in of the NALC and NRLCA.We need their support & cooperation for us to survive.

I think it would be a great cost savings to go to five day a week delivery. Our fuel costs, labor costs, and building operations costs would go down. A lot of businesses are closed on Saturday so they would not miss the mail. The businesses that are open are usually the retail/fast food kind. They could wait till Monday. I say we only deliver express mail on Saturday and Sunday. That is our number one premier service. Has anyone done a study to see how this would impact our bottom line?

As a former RCA in a small office, I know how hard it is for rural carriers to find a sub that can only work occasionally. If a sub cannot be guaranteed a regular schedule such as every Saturday or every other Saturday but just a day here and there it will make it next to impossible for a small rural office to get substitutes. Although this might work in bigger offices, rural America offices would definitely be at a loss. Small offices do not have a group of people to borrow from. I'm sure full time carriers would struggle to get days off. I wish them luck if this happens.Sometimes we need to think of our customer service and our employees and figure out another way to cut expenses. What makes the Postal Service different from other services is our Saturday regular delivery.